Beefsteak.(The Talk of the Town)(Bernard Kerik)

At a banquet in Paterson, New Jersey, last week, a slide show ran quietly in the background as the guests--most of them men, thick-necked, and wearing their hair shaved, slicked, or buzzed--picked at their antipasto and penne. The slides showed the evening's honoree as a small boy, in black-and- white, and then as a grownup in candid and posed shots with Mikhail Gorbachev, Howard Stern, Mother Teresa, Oprah, the Emir of Qatar, Reggie Jackson: a local kid done real good. Newspaper clips detailing his accomplishments had been blown up and mounted on poster board. You would never have guessed, if you poked your head in from the Wayne Hills gymnastics dinner in a function room upstairs, or the eightieth-birthday party a few rooms over, that he also faces a possible hundred and forty-two years in federal prison.

Bernard Kerik, like the rest of us, is apparently having financial trouble, though in his case there is the added problem of mounting legal fees. It has been a year since his indictment on sixteen counts of conspiracy, fraud, and providing false information. (Kerik pleaded not guilty, and his lawyers filed a motion to dismiss the charges, which is still pending.) So a group of retired cops and corrections officers calling themselves the Bernard Kerik Legal Defense Trust sent out invitations, a month ago, to "support an American hero," soliciting minimum donations of seventy-five dollars a plate. Kerik is the only New York City police commissioner ever to be indicted for committing a crime during his tenure, so the Rainbow Room or Tavern on the Green was out of the question. They settled for dinner at the Brownstone, a nineteenth-century mansion (though not exactly a brownstone) a few minutes' drive from Eastside High School, which Kerik attended, but did not graduate from, in the late sixties and early seventies. As homecomings go, this was more on the order of Britney returning to Kentwood after the head-shaving and the umbrella than of Springsteen showing up at the Stone Pony. Still, they found more than two hundred takers.

"You here for Bernie Kerik?" one man asked another, near the entrance.

"No, I got Totowa P.A.L."--a youth-football fund-raiser.

"See you at Murphy's later?"

Not everyone was local. ...